Armed with a fairly limited budget (for a superhero blockbusters, anyway), Deadpool is a rather small scaled film, but it does provide some serious antagonists for its titular character in the form of Ed Skrein’s Ajax and Gina Carano’s Angel Dust. Together they are a formidable force to face against for the Merc With The Mouth, but there were actually early drafts of the scripts that had a larger crew of baddies – including the trio of Wyre, Garrison Kane, and Sluggo.
I learned about this special triumvirate while recently interviewing Deadpool screenwriters/producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Discussing a need to make the script tighter both for the story and due to the budget, the filmmakers explained that Ajax originally had a much bigger crew than what we see in the finished cut of the movie. Said Reese,
We consolidated, in the first draft, Ajax has really three underlings. It was Wyre, it was Garrison Kane and it was Sluggo. And then ultimately due to budget, we had to consolidate those into one character. And we wanted the movie to have a really strong kick-ass female presence. That was a mandate from Tim, so we introduced, we introduced Angel Dust as sort of a combination of those three to provide the muscle for Ajax.
Those of you unfamiliar with Deadpool’s time in Marvel Comics are probably saying "Who?" right now, so allow me to give you a quick crash course in who these three guys are.
Identifiable by his constant shirtless-ness and pointy spines on his upper torso, Wyre is an assassin and mutant who first appeared in Alpha Flight comics in 1992. He is a powerful dude, with the ability to produce tendrils of inorganic fibre from his body that he can control with mental commands. As a trained killer, he is also proficient with many weapons, which would have made him a formidable foe for Deadpool.
Garrison Kane – sometimes known by the name Weapon X – was one of the first characters to enter into a showdown with Deadpool, featured in the mercenaries’ first miniseries: "The Circle Chase." We actually first learned about his almost role in the Deadpool movie in August 2015, but what’s news is that he would have been one of Ajax’s cronies and fighting alongside some other major heavies. A cyborg created in the Weapon X program, he is built with not only robotic limbs and parts that are tremendously hard to destroy, but also numerous projectile and bladed weapons that he uses with skill.
Real name Bernard Hoyster, Sluggo is yet another result of the Weapon X program, and was introduced to comics in a 1993 issue of X-Force. He has a pretty intense and formidable mutant ability in that he is basically invulnerable to all forms of physical injury. As you can see from the panel above, he has some comic book history with Wade Wilson/Deadpool – as they were trained together as mercenaries – but the fact that both characters are amoral killers pretty much means that it would have been totally fair to have Sluggo be an antagonist in the Deadpool movie.
Are you guys upset that Wyre, Garrison Kane and Sluggo didn’t make it into Deadpool, or are you happy that the production ultimately went with Angel Dust instead? Would you like to see those characters in a future X-Men universe film? Hit the comments with your thoughts!
